Kevin O’Leary-backed WonderFi acquires Coinberry for $38.5 million

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Betakit | Josh Scott | Apr 18, 2022

Wonderfi and bitbuy - Kevin O’Leary-backed WonderFi acquires Coinberry for $38.5 million

Less than a month after closing its acquisition of Bitbuy, WonderFi has entered into a definitive agreement to acquire Toronto’s Coinberry, which offers a crypto trading platform, for approximately $38.5 million CAD in WonderFi stock, based on the company’s current share price.

Once the deal has closed (expected in 2nd quarter), WonderFi will own two of Canada’s six registered crypto trading platforms in Bitbuy and Coinberry. The remaining four include CoinSmart, Wealthsimple, Netcoins, and Fidelity.

See: Crypto Pragmatist: Checkout these free crypto (trading) tools

As part of the deal, WonderFi will acquire Coinberry’s 220,000-plus Canadian customers, giving the combined firm a community of more than 750,000 users. WonderFi claims this will make it “one of the largest ecosystems of crypto participants” in North America, and establish WonderFi as Canada’s largest publicly-traded end-to-end consumer platform for crypto and DeFi.

“We’re in the process of creating the largest crypto user base in Canada,” said Samaroo. “What that does is it creates a really big stronghold in this developed, well-respected, regulated market, and creates a springboard for us into global markets.”

WonderFi aims to build a broader Web3 ecosystem by combining three separate segments of the crypto ecosystem: centralized finance—or the kind of crypto trading offered by Coinberry and Bitbuy—decentralized finance (DeFi), through its own DeFi product, and NFTs and gaming.

“It’s expensive to acquire customers,” University of Toronto Professor of Finance and blockchain expert Andreas Park told BetaKit. “Regulatory compliance is very expensive, too.”

Read: Opinion: Rising cost of compliance may lead to consolidation

“As the industry continues to mature, there is going to be consolidation,” Coinberry founder and CEO Andrei Poliakov told BetaKit. “We knew this was going to happen and it’s happening.”

WonderFi has already inked an agreement to acquire Sun Machine, a play-to-earn gaming and NFT company, in a deal it expects to close sometime during the second quarter.

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